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The historian Hector Boece (1465–1536), in his History of the Scottish People, records that, in 990, Kenneth III of Scotland defeated the Danes near Luncarty.[1] However, the Scottish historian John Hill Burton strongly suspected the battle of Luncarty to be an invention of Hector Boece.[2][3] Burton was incorrect. Walter Bower,[4] writing in his Scotichronicon around 1440, some 87 years before Boece first published his Scotorum Historia, refers to the battle briefly as follows:

"that remarkable battle of Luncarty, in which the Norsemen with their king were totally destroyed". Bower does not quote specific sources concerning the battle, but, two sentences later, he refers in a general way to ancient writings that he has consulted. The term Norsemen would include Danes.

The present village was founded in 1752 by William Sandeman, to house workers at his bleachfields.[5] The village formerly had a railway station,[6] and the Perth to Inverness railway line still runs through the village.

William Sandeman and his partner Hector Turnbull manufactured linen in Perth and bleached it in Luncarty, for instance with an order of 12,000 to 15,000 yards of "Soldiers' shirting". In 1752 he leveled 12 acres (49,000 m2) of land in Luncarty to form bleachfields. By 1790 when William died, the Luncarty bleachfields covered 80 acres (320,000 m2) and processed 500,000 yards of cloth annually. Second only to agriculture, linen manufacture was a major Scottish industry in the late 18th century — linen then became less important with the introduction of cotton.[7]